Thankful for Private Property

Updated Nov. 25, 1999 12:01 a.m. ET

Today Americans celebrate one of the year's major holidays, Thanksgiving Day. It commemorates the harvest feasts of the first Pilgrim immigrants who arrived from England in 1620. But as Governor William Bradford wrote in his history of the Plymouth Colony, the settlers initially shared in common the land and the work of cultivation, and as a result the first two harvests were meager. In 1623 that changed, because the settlers divided up the land into private plots and cultivated it individually. It is to that year that we date the first true Thanksgiving. The following is an excerpt from Bradford's "History of...